Barbara Chapman Named Head of Brookhaven Lab’s Computer Science and Mathematics Group

Barbara Chapman, a leading researcher in programming languages, programming models, and compilers, has been named head of the Computer Science and Mathematics Group (CSM) under the new Computational Science Initiative at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. Chapman is also a professor of Applied Mathematics & Statistics and Computer Science at Stony Brook University, where she serves as a joint appointee affiliated with the university’s Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS).

Barbara is an inspirational leader in the field of computer science, and we are very excited to have her on the team. Her world-renown expertise in programming models and compilers provides a crucial building block in our data-centric computing agenda,” said Kerstin Kleese Van Dam, CSI Director.

Brookhaven Lab’s Computational Science Initiative (CSI) leverages computational science, computer science, and mathematics expertise and investments across multiple research areas at the Laboratory—including the flagship facilities that attract thousands of scientific users each year—to tackle the “big data” challenges at experimental facilities and expanding the frontiers of scientific discovery.

As a core part of CSI, CSM will focus on fundamental research into novel methods and algorithms in support of hypothesis-driven streaming data analysis in high-data-volume and high-data-velocity experimental and computing environments. Further efforts will research new solutions for multi-source streaming data analysis and interpretation, as well as long-term data curation and active reuse.

“I am pleased to join Brookhaven Lab’s Computational Sciences Initiative and to lead the Computer Science and Mathematics Group,” said Chapman. “Reliability, high performance, and energy efficiency are key drivers for CSI’s user communities, so the CSM team’s research will address all relevant aspects of streaming data processing from hardware architectures to the application layers.”

Chapman’s work explores programming models for large-scale computing with a focus on node programming, strategies for runtime optimizations, compiler-tool interactions and high-level programming models for embedded systems. Her interests include programming languages, compilers, and tools for parallel and distributed computation; program development environments; embedded system development; and resource management in distributed and wide-area networks.

Much of Chapman’s current research is focused on OpenMP, an industry standard for shared memory parallel programming that has been broadly accepted by the computing community.

Chapman is the founder and CEO of cOMPunity, Inc., an organization of researchers who are committed to furthering the work of the OpenMP Architecture Review Board, the organization that maintains and develops this application programming interface.

Before coming to Brookhaven Lab and Stony Brook University, Chapman was director of the Center for Advanced Computing and Data Systems at the University of Houston.

Chapman completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland, U.K. She is a member of editorial boards for Concurrency Practice and Experience (Wiley) and the International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering (InderScience), and is also a member of the Global Arrays Steering Committee, the International Exascale Project, the Open64 Steering Group and the Executive Council of the Educational Alliance for a Parallel Future.

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